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At the core of Yocto is the Poky build system, and from a developers point of view, this is what we work with - a poky git repository. Poky provides several example Linux images, including minimal, sato, and sdk, each with an increasing number of packages (and footprint size). Poky focuses on providing a small core set of known-working packages, if you want to add to that, it offers layers which work sort of like a build-system version of external distribution package repositories (world, universe, and the like).

I have a certain friend who will remain nameless. We know each other's wives and kids, and we have had a number of adventures together. At work, he manages a team doing mostly kernel development and optimization work. He has known about the Yocto Project from the beginning, and we occasionally chat about the work.

But since he is a friend, he feels safe to taunt me occasionally, make fun of me a little. All in good fun of course, but one of his consistent jabs about Yocto goes something like this:

The Yocto Project is pleased to announce some enhancements to our planning documents to add visibility and transparency. In general, we are using the Planning page on the project wiki to collaborate on details.

1. Yocto Project Roadmap - we added a high-level roadmap document which gives a bullet-level list of features which are planned for future releases. In particular, the 1.0 release (planned for April) has frozen content, and is listed in some detail here.

I have spoken in recent weeks about the Yocto Project with several people who have a clue (and maybe even a few who don't). What seems universal is that the people who are deeply involved with Linux development for traditional embedded devices really understand why we're doing the project, and many even appreciate what we're trying to do, to help the embedded developer be more successful with embedded Linux.

Last week I was presenting as a guest at the 8th International System-on-Chip Conference, discussing "Creating Coherence in SoC Linux". It was a lot of fun talking to a very knowledgable group of embedded system designers.

One of the points I raised was that I have been working on operating systems since about 1980 or so, and Linux is fundamentally different than any OS I have ever worked with, and how this affects embedded developers.

There is an old saying that is quite reliable: "Those who love sausage and the law should see neither being made." I have a friend who once was involved in making what he called "hot pack" sausage. The description nearly turned me into a vegetarian.

But I would perhaps extend this to technology demos.

At the Emebedded Linux Conference - Europe, we had a really nice demo which graphically showed how the Yocto Project can work easily well on multiple architectures.